Toronto, Canada – Ahmed* has made the trip to and from his local mosque in the heart of Canada’s largest city hundreds of times. That’s partly why what happened to him and his family during this year’s Muslim holy month of Ramadan was so unexpected.

It was shortly after midnight in mid-March when the 14-year-old, his parents and his siblings were walking down the street after night prayers at the Toronto Islamic Centre.

Suddenly, without warning or provocation, a man began hurling racist insults at them before grabbing Ahmed by the collar and pushing him violently.

Ahmed – who asked to use a pseudonym – says his two-year-old sister began to cry. “They were really traumatised,” he told Al Jazeera in mid-April, referring to his younger siblings. It was the first time he had spoken publicly about the incident.

Ahmed grappled with what had happened. “It was really scary. I wasn’t able to sleep,” he says.

While the attack outside the Toronto Islamic Centre drew some local headlines and mosque leaders said an arrest was made, community members and experts have questioned whether this incident and others like it are being treated seriously enough.

They also warn that a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment is blending with anti-Muslim racism in Canada, leaving Muslim community members vulnerable and at heightened risk of violence.

“It is a perfect storm right now,” said Amira Elghawaby, Canada’s former special representative on combatting Islamophobia.

‘Dangerous, false narratives’

Canada has experienced several incidents of deadly, anti-Muslim violence over the past decade, making it the Group of Seven (G7) country with the most targeted killings of Muslims (PDF).

A 2017 shooting at a Quebec City mosque killed six congregants in what remains the deadliest attack on a house of worship in Canadian history.

Four years later, in 2021, four members of a Muslim family were killed when a man rammed his car into them as they were out for a walk in London, Ontario.

Since then, an affordable housing crisis and soaring grocery prices – running in parallel with a dramatic rise in temporary migration – have prompted a surge in anti-immigrant sentiment across the country.

And in 2024, pollsters reported (PDF) that, for the first time in more than two decades, a majority of Canadians believe there is “too much immigration”.

Elghawaby, the former Islamophobia envoy, noted that a confluence of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric has contributed to violence in Canada and abroad.

That includes in Quebec City, where the 2017 mosque attacker was said to have been motivated, in part, by a social media post by then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Trudeau had written that refugees seeking to flee the United States after President Donald Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” would always be welcome in Canada.

In Norway, Anders Breivik was spurred by a blend of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant, far-right rhetoric when he killed dozens of people in a bombing and shooting spree in 2011.

And back in Canada, the same combination of Islamophobia and anti-immigrant prejudice came up in the March incident outside the Toronto mosque.

According to the Toronto Islamic Centre, the suspect shouted, “Did the Liberals bring you here?” at Ahmed and his family during the attack, referring to Canada’s longstanding Liberal Party government.

The Liberals have been accused for years by right-wing politicians and activists of encouraging mass immigration for political gains.

That harks back to the Great Replacement Theory, a white supremacist conspiracy theory that posits that liberal, Western governments are seeking to replace white people with non-white newcomers.

“This rhetoric around it being a Liberal plot; these are all dangerous, false narratives,” Elghawaby told Al Jazeera, describing the comment made in Toronto as “extremely worrying”.

“The fact that it happens in the centre of one of the most multicultural, diverse cities of our country really puts to rest the idea that it’s enough for people to be exposed to diversity,” she added.

Creating ‘the Other’

Shaffni Nalir, the Toronto Islamic Centre’s general manager, said the attacker asking, “Did the Liberals bring you here?” is “very definitely xenophobic in nature”.

But Nalir said the idea that Muslims in particular “don’t belong” in Canada was a key element of the attack, as well.

The message, he told Al Jazeera, is that “you’re not from here, that you are here as a hand-out, that you don’t contribute”.

According to experts, that “Other-ing” of Canadian Muslims is an important factor in Islamophobic violence, as well as in how the authorities respond to such cases.

“Muslims are ascribed to be inherently violent. Muslims are ascribed to be barbaric, uncivilised, sitting outside the polity of Canada, which is a white, Western country,” explained Fahad Ahmad, an assistant professor of criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU).

“And because of that, I think interpersonal violence doesn’t even register at the level it would if, say, for example, somebody attacked a Jewish person for them wearing a kippah or entering a synagogue.”

Ahmad said a review of Canadian media coverage since late 2023 – as tensions have soared amid Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza – showed a much higher number of stories focused on anti-Jewish threats and violence, compared with anti-Muslim ones.

“Islamophobia is seen as a lower-order problem,” Ahmad told Al Jazeera. “And if it’s seen as a lower-order problem, then of course the resources that are going to be mobilised in response to that problem are going to be lower order.”

Advisory council

The Canadian government has repeatedly stated that it takes all forms of hate-motivated violence seriously, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

In 2024, Ottawa launched a so-called Action Plan on Combatting Hate, earmarking more than 270 million Canadian dollars ($191m) over six years for initiatives aimed at helping communities tackle the problem.

The plan explicitly denounces “hate-motivated crimes and terrorist attacks”, including the deadly, anti-Muslim violence seen in Quebec City and London, Ontario, over the past decade.

But earlier this year, the Carney government said it was shuttering the offices of Canada’s envoys to combat Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, respectively, to launch an advisory council on rights, equality and inclusion.

The move drew criticism from the National Council of Canadian Muslims, which said it was “deeply disappointed” that Elghawaby’s office was being closed amid a continued “rise of Islamophobia in Canada”.

“The Canadian Muslim community deserves sustained and dedicated leadership,” the advocacy group said.

In an email to Al Jazeera, a spokesperson for the Department of Canadian Heritage, which oversees the country’s antiracism strategy, said the new advisory council will build on the work of the former anti-Semitism and Islamophobia envoys.

“We recognise the prevalence of antisemitism and Islamophobia across the country, and we will continue to address these critical issues through Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy and Canada’s Action Plan on Combatting Hate,” the statement said.

It added that the new council will work to “foster social cohesion and bring communities together, to rally Canadians around shared identity, combat racism and hate in all their forms, and help guide the efforts of the Government of Canada”.

On June 1, Carney unveiled the makeup of the council, which will include former Senator Marc Gold, the former chair of the Canada-Israel Committee, a pro-Israel lobby group.

Meanwhile, back at the Toronto Islamic Centre, Nalir said the community had mobilised to protect itself amid a wave of recent threats.

After Ahmed and his family were assaulted, another congregant was attacked nearby, prompting the mosque to implement a buddy system to ensure no one has to come to or leave the building alone. The incidents came after the mosque also received a threatening phone call.

“We were not going to wait around for more of our worshippers to be attacked. So, we were going to take our protection into our own hands, and that’s the way we knew how,” Nalir said.

He added that, despite the incidents, members of the mosque “don’t want to be seen as victims … We want to be seen as members of the community,” he told Al Jazeera.

Fourteen-year-old Ahmed said the same, stressing the importance of education in dispelling false stereotypes about Muslim Canadians. “Muslims aren’t what you hear in the media,” he said. “Muslims aren’t different.”

*Some names have been changed for purposes of anonymity.